History

gletex v0.10 (alpha) from June 3 1997 was the first implementation of gletex (which was written in awk!). The idea for this project came from Prof. Ingold - many thanks to the mental father of gletex. This first version has used an existing program from Prof. Ingold named psformel for creating the encapsulated postscript files. An error corrected version - gletex v0.11 (alpha) from June 6 1997 - was successfully used for a few month. In this version all the TeX expressions have been recreated every time gletex was started. But it became obvious that the usage could be improved considerably by temporary storage of the most recent TeX expressions.

gletex v0.20 (beta) from October 21 1997 implemented such a temporary storage. Due to the higher complexity C was used instead of awk. A second substantial change in this version was an error handling for wrong TeX expressions. This version was successfully in use for about 1½ years.

gletex v0.30 (beta) from May 19 1999 was written again in another language, namely perl. (My personal goal for doing this was to learn perl. Please remember that the program was written by a beginner and my aim was to write a small useful tool in perl rather than a large well done software project.) One benefit of a perl implementation of gletex is the easy installation, because perl is a script language. Additionally some features were added which had been missed in the former version over the years, especially LaTeX support (for people how know LaTeX much better than TeX), flexible database size (previously fixed at 20 enties) and an error return code, which had been missed for calling gletex from make. Another main intention was the backwards compatibility. Some bug fixing (mostly within the gletex file parser) resulted in the versions gletex v0.31 (beta) vom August 4 1999, gletex v0.32 (beta) from February 4 2000 and gletex v0.33 (beta) from March 23 2000, which is the latest version.

Theoretical physics I | Physics department | Augsburg University